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Document UC deductions review findings: floor scope, validated years, bias direction - #1821

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uc-deductions-review-notes
Aug 14, 2026
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Document UC deductions review findings: floor scope, validated years, bias direction#1821
MaxGhenis merged 5 commits into
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uc-deductions-review-notes

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Follow-up to #1815 addressing the methodology review's documentation and test items:

  • Protected floor scope: notes on protected_floor.yaml that the modeled floor binds on all deduction categories, including last resort and child maintenance (current law allows those above the cap; JRF's briefing does not state whether their design exempts them — flagged for follow-up if it does).
  • Validated years and regional composition: the latent rate distribution is national (regional factors scale incidence only) and validated against 2024–2025 observations; earlier years inherit it under their higher caps as an uncalibrated extrapolation.
  • Direction of bias under cap reforms: lowering the cap further overstates newly constrained households and their gains; raising it rests on the distribution observed under the 25% cap.
  • Annualization: annual per-household amounts are upper bounds for spell-limited deduction types (e.g. advance recovery).
  • Aggregate caveat promoted to the changelog, with pointers to policyengine-uk-data#452 (UC caseload ~40% below admin counts — the binding limitation for floor-reform aggregates) and Add OpenFisca-UK methodology overview #450 (moving the imputation to dataset build).
  • Test: zeroing all seven combination shares degrades gracefully (combination NONE, zero deductions, no crash) — covering the review's enum-fallback concern.

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MaxGhenis and others added 2 commits August 13, 2026 12:49
From the post-merge methodology review on #1815: the protected floor
binds on all deduction categories including last resort and child
maintenance (JRF's briefing does not state their intent for those); the
rate distribution is national and validated for 2024-2025, with earlier
years an uncalibrated extrapolation under higher caps; cap-lowering
reforms overstate newly constrained households while cap raises rest on
the observed 25%-cap distribution; annual amounts are upper bounds for
spell-limited types. Adds a graceful-degradation test for zeroed
combination shares and promotes the aggregate-caseload caveat to the
changelog with pointers to policyengine-uk-data#452 and #450.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MaxGhenis and others added 3 commits August 13, 2026 22:33
Main already carried a fuller floor-binding note and a stronger
zero-shares test; drop the redundant additions. State validation
correctly: model years 2024-2025 are validated against the March 2025
to February 2026 observations (which begin March 2025).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Main gained fuller validated-years and bias-direction notes in parallel;
this branch now adds only the national-composition sentence, the
annualization upper-bound note, and the promoted changelog caveat.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@MaxGhenis
MaxGhenis merged commit 88d9aca into main Aug 14, 2026
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MaxGhenis deleted the uc-deductions-review-notes branch August 14, 2026 02:51
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